Reset S.M.A.R.T. data?

[Darkfalz]

Hello. Is there any utility to reset the S.M.A.R.T. table for enabled
hard disks? I assume this is stored on some NVRAM on the HD PCB
itself, not on the platters.

I'm not having any problems with my drives, I'd just like them set
back to factory defaults.

Oh they are both DiamondMax Plus 9 drives. I tried both Maxtor
utilities (Powermax and Maxblast) and neither of them had an option to
clear the S.M.A.R.T. table.

 

[Joep]

Hello. Is there any utility to reset the S.M.A.R.T. table for enabled
hard disks? I assume this is stored on some NVRAM on the HD PCB
itself, not on the platters.

I'm not having any problems with my drives, I'd just like them set
back to factory defaults.

And then sell it as brand new? No 'hours run', 'spin ups' and all that. If a
disk is running okay, doesn't mean all smart values have to be set back to
start.

If you want to reset smart data, you either don't get what smart is about,
or you have bad intentions.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

Hello. Is there any utility to reset the S.M.A.R.T. table for enabled
hard disks? I assume this is stored on some NVRAM on the HD PCB
itself, not on the platters.

I'm not having any problems with my drives, I'd just like them set
back to factory defaults.

Oh they are both DiamondMax Plus 9 drives. I tried both Maxtor
utilities (Powermax and Maxblast) and neither of them had an option to
clear the S.M.A.R.T. table.

Gee, wonder why that is.
Next you are going to complain why the won't remove drive passwords either.

 

[Darkfalz]

And then sell it as brand new? No 'hours run', 'spin ups' and all that. If a
disk is running okay, doesn't mean all smart values have to be set back to
start.

If you want to reset smart data, you either don't get what smart is about,
or you have bad intentions.

That's not the reason at all. I just added a second HD and just wanted
to reset the first one so that they both appeared of equal age *to
me*. I am just kind of obsessed with "defaults" or things being
equal... I guess it's a mild OCD. Thank you for jumping to a stupid
conclusion. Only an idiot would buy a second hand HDD anyway (well,
unless they need a small one for a 486 box or something).

 

[Chris]

Gee, wonder why that is.
Next you are going to complain why the won't remove drive passwords either.

No, there's no way. Certain attributes (temperature for example) will
increase back up to 100 (or whatever the manufacturer uses as maximum)
but the lowest ever value is logged forever in "Worst". Some
attributes (such as power on time) can only come down.

 

[Svend Olaf Mikkelsen]

No, there's no way. Certain attributes (temperature for example) will
increase back up to 100 (or whatever the manufacturer uses as maximum)
but the lowest ever value is logged forever in "Worst". Some
attributes (such as power on time) can only come down.

But we remember that updating IBM 60GXP firmware did reset all smart
data, including power on hours.

 

[Joep]

"Joep" <j o e p @ d i y d a t a r e c o v e r y . n l> wrote in message

That's not the reason at all. I just added a second HD and just wanted
to reset the first one so that they both appeared of equal age *to
me*. I am just kind of obsessed with "defaults" or things being
equal... I guess it's a mild OCD. Thank you for jumping to a stupid
conclusion. Only an idiot would buy a second hand HDD anyway (well,
unless they need a small one for a 486 box or something).

That's like resetting the milage of a car - it ran 100.000 but it's as good
as new, so why not reset it to zero ... Your 2 drives are not equal of age.
Period. I jumped to this conclusion because of the stupidness of the
question.

 

[djn]

Hmmm, this is an old thread but I just found it while Googling.

I understand that there are 'bad' reasons for wanting to reset SMART
data, but there is, at least, one good reason. The reason is that
SMART isn't perfect. Evidence for this is the fact that Maxtor have a
utility for one of their drives which resets a specific attribute
because triggers too early.

In my case I have an issue with a Maxtor drive on the same attribute,
but sadly the utility won't reset it for me. My problem is that the
drive is failing on the "spin up count" attribute. When I run
Spinrite I'm told that I should back up my data because drive failure
is 'Imminent'. My SMART monitoring software gives me frequent
warnings about the same thing. The problem is that these utilities
have been giving these warnings for nearly two years and the drive
has worked perfectly. It's not used as a 'main' drive and I only use
it for transitory storage, but I don't see why I should spend money
before I need to. I certainly don't intend to sell the drive.

Because nothing will let me reset the, clearly broken, SMART data I
have to click through warnings all the time which is very annoying.

Dave

==============
Posted through www.HowToFixComputers.com/bb - free access to hardware troubleshooting newsgroups.

 

[G Story]

Another reason to reset

A reason I have is I have 2 identical HDD. On one, the controller card failed but the drive is good. The second drive had a smart fail. So I am able to swap controller cards and use my 2nd drive but would like to rid myself of the boot error telling me of a smart fail. I only use this drive as a temp drive while editing photos, so data loss is not really a concern.

That's my 2 cents.

 

[stonehenge]

And another good reason...

Searching google for the same question, I came across this forum, and found the unhelpful posts of ridicule.. well, typical of the internet.

My 160gig WD hdd which has just missed it's warranty period has developed bad sectors within the first 13gigs of the drive. Now I can partition this off, as the remainder of the drive is fine. but I too am stuck with the SMART warnings, and personally would like to reset the data so that any new bad sectors would be marked and moved to good ones.

Sure I don't fully understand how SMART works at this point, as this was the first thing I did after letting spinrite reveal to me how much of a problem there was.

But no doubt I'll find countless posts from people who just 'know' Im really an evil fiend and want to dupe someone on ebay or something..... so helpfull...

sheesh

 

[AdobeWanKenobi]

It is better to ask a question and APPEAR ignorant, than NOT ASK and STAY THAT WAY!

"Joep" wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
.
.
.
That's like resetting the milage [sic] of a car - it ran 100.000 but it's as good
as new, so why not reset it to zero ... Your 2 drives are not equal of age.
Period. I jumped to this conclusion because of the stupidness [sic] of the
question.

--
Joep

I don't think this question is 'Stupid', as there are no such things as stupid questions. Stupidity comes when you ask the same question over and over, expecting a different answer.

I am interested in resetting the S.M.A.R.T. data on my drive as well, but you, Joep, would believe that I'm a career criminal selling bogus drives simply because I ASKED the question.

I had a power supply failure, that caused my drive to register in the S.M.A.R.T. table that THE DRIVE ITSELF had a power problem... and now, my system will not boot without intervention because it states "Your drive is in danger of imminent failure, back up your data and have it replaced immediately. Press [F2] to continue."... and has done so for OVER 2 YEARS. SpinRite v6.0 shows the drive to be perfect, BTW.

I'd simply like to be able to have an uninterrupted boot, and it seems the only way to do so (according to you) is throw away a perfectly good drive, and go buy another one.

Now THAT is stupid!

 

[billgun]

I ended up here by posing the same question to my browser.,I was hoping to reset the smart attributes to also get rid of messages about my hard drive failing which in my experience the smart attributes seem to be a way for the hard drive manufacturers to fail your hard drive for erroneous reasons.I have had hard drives not allow access due to smart attributes.I have had the computer tell me that there are irrecoverable errors etc.Through a lot of different methods I have been able to recover about 8 of 9 hard drives.The one I couldn't recover was taken apart.The data was not attempted to recover,just the ability to erase the hard drive and start over.Unfortunately computers over 486 seem to pick up on the smart attributes if you are running windows,apparently a deal between microsoft and the hard drive makers.some of the hard drives were western digital and even their software would report the hard drives as no good but if I switched to an older computer I could get it working again and have WD's software report the hard drive as no errors after writing zeros to the hard drive On a newer computer you can load Ubuntu operating system which will ignore these lame attributes,but if you go on the internet with one of these hard drives most likely something new will be written to the hard drive to force fail it.P.S.Don't believe everything your computer tells you.Prefail means we want you to spend more money and throw away your perfectly good hard drives.

 

[[Yezok]]

I don't think this question is 'Stupid', as there are no such things as stupid questions. Stupidity comes when you ask the same question over and over, expecting a different answer.

I am interested in resetting the S.M.A.R.T. data on my drive as well, but you, Joep, would believe that I'm a career criminal selling bogus drives simply because I ASKED the question.

I had a power supply failure, that caused my drive to register in the S.M.A.R.T. table that THE DRIVE ITSELF had a power problem... and now, my system will not boot without intervention because it states "Your drive is in danger of imminent failure, back up your data and have it replaced immediately. Press [F2] to continue."... and has done so for OVER 2 YEARS. SpinRite v6.0 shows the drive to be perfect, BTW.

I'd simply like to be able to have an uninterrupted boot, and it seems the only way to do so (according to you) is throw away a perfectly good drive, and go buy another one.

Now THAT is stupid!

I agree, I have a Hitachi SATA drive in my acer laptop that has done the same, and no ther is nothing wrong with the drive, chkdsk, spinrite find no errors on the drive, the Hitachi drive fitness test reports a smart error it actually says BxD where the x is actuall a rectangle block the the old DOS 6 defrag block that show a sector that has data. What has set the smart flag was due to poor soldering of the sata connector on the motherboard, I have long since since repaired the sata connector on the board i no longer have problems with the drive but have to press the F1 key on every boot.
It is a common problem whit this model of acer laptop see http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=256427&page=2

why is it that people jump to conclusions that persons like myself need to reset the smart on the drive because we are trying to sell faulty equipment or change drive attributes like spinup or hours of opperation. I just want to clear the faulty smart error so i do not have to keep hitting the Fu******* F1 key on every boot
Just my two cents

 

[Mr Stonky]

Joep and Folkert -- you are very rude. The question is reasonable.

I also need to find the answer to the same question. I'm not a newbie. I have 28 years' experience in computing (was writing machine code at the age of 12) and microprocessor systems electronics. But I don't claim to know everything.

I have a hard drive where the user had run HDDRegenerator to try to fix "problems" and now the drive has many relocated sectors. However, it turned out that the IDE controller was faculty. So I cannot trust the SMART info. I'd like to reset it and re-scan fully to check its working state, if possible.

I will be keeping until it dies or becomes irrelevant. Would you like to accuse me of being a criminal too?

 

[[Yezok]]

Joep and Folkert -- you are very rude. The question is reasonable.

I also need to find the answer to the same question. I'm not a newbie. I have 28 years' experience in computing (was writing machine code at the age of 12) and microprocessor systems electronics. But I don't claim to know everything.

I have a hard drive where the user had run HDDRegenerator to try to fix "problems" and now the drive has many relocated sectors. However, it turned out that the IDE controller was faculty. So I cannot trust the SMART info. I'd like to reset it and re-scan fully to check its working state, if possible.

I will be keeping until it dies or becomes irrelevant. Would you like to accuse me of being a criminal too?

HDDRegenerator is a bad program I have found out after it toasted 2 perfectly drives.
In both cases it has corrupted the S.M.A.R.T on the drive.
The first being a Western Digital WD800AVBB This drive did have one bad block that Spinrite found during the locate surface defects test but it was ECC Correctable.
So I decided to give HDDRegenerator a go to see if could return that bad block back to service and ended up with a drive with S.M.A.R.T error press F1 to continue.

The Second was a Maxtor 6L200P0, This drive was perfect.
In the case of this drive Spinrite found no errors on the drive when I ran the locate surface defects test.
But in my infinite wisdom since I bought HDD Rgenerator I decided to run on the Maxtor to see if it would find anything, which subsequently it did not, and low and behold when I rebooted The computer, The Annoying Smart error press F1 To continue.

My advise is stay away from HDDRegenerator, after all what do you expect from a $69.00 program.
It is a waste of money

 

[Jonny Quick]

Me Too

I also have used HDD Regenerator (but I didn't pay for it).

It actually DID do some good. The IBM Thinkpad I was working on had a Toshiba HD that wouldn't boot, and wouldn't complete a chkdsk. HDD Regenerator spent about 12 hours finding over a thousand "Bad Sectors" and "Repaired" them.

The drive now passes numerous chkdsks with no errors

-BUT-

When trying to install SP3 (standalone) the data that was copied to a temporary directory has various missing files (.dll's, and whatnot). Files that were just copied to the HD are missing several minutes later. And, the SMART status is bad (when it didn't used to be this way).

Here's a "legal", "moral" and "upstanding" reason to want to clear SMART status:

Toshiba does not provide any kind of diagnostic utilities for their HD's (which is one REALLY good reason to NEVER buy their products). IBM makes a Think Pad disk checking software, which has a bunch of tests, etc... to run on the Toshiba drive.

The first test is a check of the SMART status, which it tells me is bad, and the software will not run any other tests. It just tells me to replace what may be a perfectly good drive. I can't tell yet, because the stupid testing software won't run the tests.

Unless I can clear the bad SMART data, I have no way of actually testing the drive, except for chkdsk (which says it is good), and by using it (which indicates that it is bad). Oh yeah, and IBM ThinkPad's do not have a switch to turn off the SMART function in the BIOS. I'm not asking for help here; I'll figure this thing out. (I always do.)

My point is that first, just because you can't imagine why a person would ask a question (because you yourself are stupid) does not necessarily mean that there is something wrong with the person asking it (criminal intentions, etc...)

Second, Law Enforcement is paid very well to do their job; no one asked for some pin-head to come along and offer their moral and legal perspective. Please note the title of the thread is not "Wanted: Obnoxious Jackasses to Pontificate on their Moral and Legal Opinions". It's an infinate ocean out here, and all your efforts at controlling the thoughts and behaviors of others only succeed in underlining what furtive and masturbatory freaks you are yourselves. Better you should worry about your own thoughts and behaviors, and leave these weighty technical matters to those of us that are qualified to discuss them.

 

[cnd4]

SMART is an internal drive sector-reallocation table - when the drive detected a screwed up sector, it uses SMART to store the data on some other sector.


You never want to re-set the SMART data - that is asking to deliberately use all the known bad sectors on the drive again.

 

[nimd4]

You never want to re-set the SMART data - that is asking to deliberately use all the known bad sectors on the drive again.

Sure (& 2 everythin' else written in this thread ), but check this out... Supposedly I have some bad sectors on this ST380021A drive. Looking @ it from the newest Fedora (13) also tells me the same thing. The problem is, HDD Regenerator and Seagate SeaTools do not see eye-to-eye with this assessment (so, what 2 do?!??). Screenshots:





P.S.
I'm also posting @ tomshardware.co.uk b/c there's a suspiciously similar thread there :$

tomshardware.co.uk/forum/139211-14-reset-data

 

[benvanderjagt]

*sigh* Gotta love when the overlords know better than we do what we should do with our own stuff.

I have another couple of laptop drives with erroneous SMART data. In this case, they were used on a hard drive adapter and the power connector wasn't hooked up. The drives attempted to spin up but failed (of course) and now both have spin-up times beyond the threshold. There's -nothing- else wrong with these drives, but now I'm stuck with them. I guess there really isn't any way to clear the SMART data, but the feature is idiotic, just like the password feature, which is all to often set by mistake by faulty laptop BIOSes.

 

[LPSBoo]

hard disk sentinal

I have had a spin retry count error on a Seagate 500 gig drive (st3500320as) and to stop the errors from hindering my system I have used hard disk sentinel 3.40 pro and disabled that specific s.m.a.r.t. attribute and now disk reads as health 100% from 40% but I don’t think this is a permanent solutions as you need to have an opp sys running to use the program but it may be able allow you to thoroughly check the drive and you can also change the attributes hope this helps.